


Even the Smallest Ripple

by aces



Category: Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors, Real Person Fiction
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-18
Updated: 2009-07-18
Packaged: 2020-10-18 16:00:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20641841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: It wasn’t a fine day for politics, but stumping was stumping, and Americans had always loved their politics.





	Even the Smallest Ripple

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: An abundance of useless historical trivia and lolz at senatorial candidates? 
> 
> Thanks to nonelvis for looking at this a while back and to kindkit for a Britpick!

It had rained the day before. It was windy now—they didn’t call it Galesburg for nothing, even if the town was actually named after a founder—and muddy, and a horrible day to be outside.

Nonetheless, the lawn was crowded as people milled about, waiting for the debate to begin. Originally it had been scheduled for the less sheltered park but because of the weather they had decided to build, quickly, a platform on the east side of the college’s brand-new building. A lovely red brick affair with a cupola on top in the pseudo-gothic style favored for public buildings at the time, a crowning sign of civilization in what the young country still considered the (uncivilized) West.

Fitz looked uncomfortable in his frockcoat and braces; he hadn’t put on a hat and his shirt was unbuttoned at the top. Sam looked almost as uncomfortable in her dress—the Doctor was surprised she’d put it on, but she’d said something about blending in being a good idea on occasion and had insisted that Fitz wear his coat, even if she couldn’t get him to put on the hat. The bell of the skirt swept out around her, but she carried it off with a lot more panache than Fitz was managing his own sartorial splendor.

The Doctor smiled. Even as a teenager, Sam had had a lot of panache.

The crowd was muttering to itself, little knots of individuals chatting quietly, people standing and waiting, thousands of them, and the Doctor tried to remember if this was one of the better-attended debates or not. People had come in their finery; they could afford to take the day off, and who would want to miss the entertainment? They’d all read about the previous debates in other towns around the state; some of them probably had even attended one or two of those other debates, judging by some of the conversations the Doctor overheard. It wasn’t a fine day for politics, but stumping was stumping, and Americans had always loved their politics.

“They can’t get on the platform,” Sam said suddenly. The Doctor had noticed other women in the crowds, though they were mostly safely on the arms of men or clustered in their own groups. Sam was holding onto Fitz’s arm, whether to stop him from wandering off or so she could continue to ‘blend in,’ the Doctor wasn’t willing to guess. She’d stopped come to a halt among the crowd and was staring up at the building and the platform. Fitz was also looking that way, hunched awkwardly in his frockcoat against the wind.

“Oh dear,” the Doctor said, coming up beside his friends. Sam looked up at him, smiled, and tucked her free arm into his. He grinned at her in her silly little hat with its feathers and flowers—she’d insisted on finding in the TARDIS wardrobe a hat with fake feathers, not real ones taken from a real bird—and looked back to the activity on the platform. The door wouldn’t open out; the men inside couldn’t get onto the platform.

“Somebody didn’t think that through very carefully,” Fitz snorted and then got quiet when one or two men turned back to frown at him. “Wish I had an overcoat,” he added in a mutter.

Sam laughed suddenly. “They’re going through the _window_,” she said and pointed with the hand she’d been gripping Fitz with.

“It’s rude to point,” Fitz said, and Sam stuck her tongue out at him, earning a gasp from one older lady and a glare from the older lady’s husband, and Fitz received a couple more disapproving frowns when he stuck his own tongue out in response.

The men filed out of the large window to the side of the door in the brick building. The last one was tall enough that he seemed bent in half in order to get through; the one before short and stocky enough that the Doctor momentarily wondered if he’d actually _fit_ through. But he did, his dignity only a little ruffled. The tall one said something to the people on the platform—“At last, I have been through college,” perhaps?—making them laugh.

“So that’s what he really looks like,” Sam’s voice was soft. The Doctor looked down at her again and saw the captivated, excited look in her eyes. He grinned and kept his arm tucked over hers.

The short, stocky man spoke first. He spoke about states’ rights, popular sovereignty, how issues should be handled in the territories as they joined the Union, specifically slavery; he accused his opponent of a fair number of things. He spoke for an hour, and then the taller, leaner man took center stage.

He’d forgotten his hat like Fitz, it seemed, and he looked something of a mess in comparison to his opponent’s dapper dress. The Doctor and his friends weren’t close enough to see how threadbare his coat was—or had he bought a new suit for this campaign?—but they could see it didn’t fit quite correctly, that his trouser legs were a bit too short and he hadn’t buttoned his waistcoat. He was still clean shaven at this point in his life.

“Blimey, this is boring,” Fitz said under his breath, stifling a yawn.

The wind howled through the trees and over the grass on the campus grounds, and the crowd in front of the platform huddled together _en masse_ against the cold. There were thousands of people there that day, and it was before such a thing as PA systems; the Doctor wondered how many people could actually hear the speakers. Fitz had taken Sam’s other arm again, though the Doctor couldn’t tell if he was being polite or just trying to find a way to warm up some small part of his body. Sam was snug as could be, the Doctor knew; she’d put jeans on under her skirt. Sam was nothing if not practical.

But Sam was also young, and human, and both young enough and human enough to be excited about the debate happening before them in this small college town in the middle of the prairie, a town and college that had only existed for twenty years in a state that had only been formed twenty years before that.

It wasn’t a big moment, the Doctor knew. 1858 and these debates would be remembered for a long time into the future, the style of debate would also become well-known and even named after these two gentlemen, but future events would overtake these quiet, well-mannered dialogues scattered across the little towns of this state, overshadow them into something much smaller. Nonetheless, these debates were a sign, one of the many beginnings that would develop into the coming years.

There was something exciting about being at the start of something, the Doctor had long ago realized during his travels. Something terribly thrilling about knowing that you were witnessing something extraordinary before anybody else knew, even if it was just a couple men campaigning for a position with the country’s Senate.

Sam had that look on her face right now. She understood. The Doctor grinned. He’d known she would.

“But there still is a difference, I think, between Judge Douglas and the Republicans in this. I suppose that the real difference between Judge Douglas and his friends, and the Republicans on the contrary, is that the Judge is not in favor of making any difference between Slavery and Liberty — that he is in favor of eradicating, of pressing out of view, the questions of preference in this country for Free over Slave institutions; and consequently every sentiment he utters discards the idea that there is any wrong in Slavery,” the man on the platform said, and the crowd was listening closely, though they’d been laughing a few minutes before at a story he had told. “Everything that emanates from him or his coadjutors in their course of policy, carefully excludes the thought that there is anything wrong in Slavery. All their arguments, if you will consider them, will be seen to exclude the thought that there is anything whatever wrong in Slavery. If you will take the Judge's speeches, and select the short and pointed sentences expressed by him — as his declaration that he 'don't care whether Slavery is voted up or down' — you will see at once that this is perfectly logical, if you do not admit that Slavery is wrong.”

Fitz shifted from one foot to the other, surreptitiously. Various members of the crowd were cheering or glaring, depending upon their own political proclivities. The college’s administration had obviously had no compunction stating whose side they were on, considering the large banner proclaiming their favorite candidate that hung up along the front, north-facing side of their new building. The Doctor looked around at the other individuals in the crowd; he quite liked a spot of people-watching, when he got the chance.

“This is but an opinion, and the opinion of one very humble man; but it is my opinion that the Dred Scot decision, as it is, never would have been made in its present form if the party that made it had not been sustained previously by the elections. My own opinion is, that the new Dred Scot decision, deciding against the right of the people of the States to exclude slavery, will never be made, if that party is not sustained by the elections.”

Leaves crunched under people’s feet. There were still many leaves on the trees, red and gold and brown, oaks and maples and poplars, though most of the trees were across the street, in the park. It would have been a beautiful autumn day were it not for the cold, harsh north wind. The three friends clung to each other. Many didn’t seem to notice the weather as they cheered and laughed their candidate on. Sam frowned sometimes as he spoke, and if she’d been talking with him individually she probably would have grilled him on a number of his points, but the Doctor could tell she didn’t think it very practical to start yelling questions out across the lawn. Fitz just seemed confused about why everyone was laughing.

The Doctor remembered a night eight or ten years ago—chronologically speaking—at an inn on the outskirts of Sangamon County, surrounded by lawyers and Judge Davis, chatting and laughing and wiling the long night away despite an even longer day at court. They’d all be leaving for the next town in the morning, but that didn’t stop most of them from staying up to discuss life, the universe, and everything. It had been a good night, he thought with a smile.

The speaker was winding up his speech; the Doctor could hear it in the way he spoke, see it in the way the crowd reacted. This was a time and a place for speech-making; both Sam and Fitz grew up in an era on their planet and in their culture when such speeches would never have lasted so long or captured nearly so much interest.

“Our views are before the public,” said the tall, thin man on the platform. “I am willing and anxious that they should consider them fully-that they should turn it about and consider the importance of the question, and arrive at a just conclusion as to whether it is or is not wise in the people of this Union, in the acquisition of new territory, to consider whether it will add to the disturbance that is existing amongst us — whether it will add to the one only danger that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union or our own liberties. I think it is extremely important they shall decide, and rightly decide that question before entering upon that policy.”

Even Fitz looked interested at last. When Lincoln stepped away, Fitz applauded just as vigorously as the rest of the crowd, pulling away from Sam to do so.

She looked at the Doctor. “It’s the little moments,” she said, with a sly little grin, and then she turned back to the platform to clap as well.

The Doctor looked around the crowd as Douglas finished his half-hour response, watched Lincoln and Douglas both crawl back into the building that someday in the next fifty years would become known as Old Main. The wind died down, for a moment at least, and it was a beautiful October day.

Fitz looked sideways at the Doctor, that odd, shifty look he had sometimes as if embarrassed, or nervous. Or maybe both. Fitz was an odd one, but the TARDIS liked him, and so did the Doctor—a little bit despite himself, he sometimes wryly thought.

“Way to make history a little more interesting,” Fitz told him in a low voice as he shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. “Especially American history, which I’ve always found very confusing and filled with weird squabbling.”

“He was a lot more conservative than I expected,” Sam put in, and the three companions mutually swung around to wander to the outskirts of the crowd, making their way slowly back to the TARDIS. “I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised; I remember reading that about him somewhere, and I know he didn’t start out an abolitionist, but—I was surprised.”

“And angry?” the Doctor asked.

Sam looked thoughtful. “Sometimes you can’t have a revolution overnight,” she said. “And he’s still working within the system.”

The Doctor beamed at her. Fitz looked away.

“Thanks,” she went on, elbowing the Doctor gently. “For taking us here. It makes a nice change.”

“Yeah,” Fitz chipped in, staring at his feet as they walked. The Doctor wondered if his shoes pinched; he didn’t look very comfortable. “Thank you.”

There would be war here in a couple years. Civil war that ripped the country apart, and it wouldn’t heal from the wounds completely for a long, long time. There would always be somebody to remember, and resent, or be overly righteous. But this afternoon a tall, thoughtful man had said some things that would help lead to him gaining an unexpected nomination as the American President in a couple years, and events would play out—perhaps inevitably—from there.

“You know, the next President to come from this state,” the Doctor said suddenly, “will win his election almost exactly 150 years from now. And he’ll be a black man.”

Sam and Fitz both looked at him and then looked over their shoulders. But Abraham Lincoln wasn’t visible anymore; he was probably warm inside Old Main somewhere, standing in front of a fire and making a crowd of well-wishers laugh at his stories.

“Fab,” Fitz said suddenly, and Sam laughed in delight.

**Author's Note:**

> Speech texts came from <http://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/inside.asp?ID=26&subjectID=2>


End file.
